SPA 357 U.S.-Latino/a Literature
Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s phrase “Life on the Hyphen,” while referring specifically to the Cuban American community, lays bare the ineluctable double-consciousness of all U.S.-Latin@s. The course emphasizes the aesthetics of narrative, poetry, theater, and autobiography in the literature of Chican@, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Cuban, and Dominican authors writing in the United States. Writers such as Tomás Rivera, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cristina García, Luis Urrea, and Nilo Cruz “perform” within these genres to negotiate an identity simultaneously inflected through ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality—all of which is further inscribed within a dominant culture that has systematically excluded them from juridical and cultural citizenship. Salient themes to be explored include (im)migration, exile, diaspora, nostalgia, heteroglossia, epistemic violence, mestizaje, border-crossing, and others that emerge as we read. Despite a thematic focus on these and other contested territories, this course aims to show that U.S.-Latin@ authors should not be relegated to a cultural “third space,” but that they instead be considered as part of the broader American literary canon.
Prerequisite
SPA 250 or permission of the instructor.